Ponderings of science, philosophy, history, society, and many other topics
This week I had to block a couple of people on different platforms. Neither seemed able to make their point without lacing in insults. One seemed to be on a mission to make me feel as bad about my outlook as possible. The disagreements were on purely metaphysical grounds, physicalism vs non-physicalism. And seem to … Continue reading Chill about metaphysics
Philosopher Wilfrid Sellars had a term for the world as it appears, the "manifest image." This is the world as we perceive it. In it, an apple is an apple, something red or green with a certain shape, a range of sizes, a thing that we can eat, or throw. The manifest image can be … Continue reading Is the ultimate nature of reality mental?
Donald D. Hoffman, a psychologist at the University of California, Irving, has been getting a lot of attention recently for his views, that evolutionary evidence indicates that reality is an illusion, that the only thing that exists are conscious minds. This is a modern version of an ancient concept, called idealism. The earliest writings about … Continue reading Is reality an illusion? If so, does it matter?
Eric Schwitzgebel is reading Stannis Lem's novel 'Solaris' and discovers in the novel a test of the existence of the external world: I instructed the satellite to give me the figure of the galactic meridians it was traversing at 22-second intervals while orbiting Solaris, and I specified an answer to five decimal points. Then I sat … Continue reading Proof that the external world exists?
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